Tony is a Geek

I'm a bit of a CyberPunk geek.... you may have guessed that already. However, just watched the first 2 of these and man, did they take me back in time! Wow! I think I've had pretty much every one of those dodgy movies on VHS back in the early 90's, as for the games, had a few - didn't even know that a load of those even existed, life could have been very different had I known.... anyway, watch, observe and appreciate losing yourself for a few hours in these very well made videos about Cyberpunk. Part 1:   Part 2:   Part 3:   ....and now we will have the Omniverse / Metaverse.... looks like the old Cyberpunks are going to get their way in the end... dystopian future being jacked into a pointless existence of digital mayhem... oh well, let's join in and break some rules :-D

 I'll post an update about Metaverse later on and all the fun and games (and vapourware etc...) but for now I'll post this REALLY interesting video from NVIDIA (yes, that NVIDIA), wow! they have been very busy in the background.... ....OmniVerse is where it's going to be at - for Industry and Businesses...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhDiaUL_RaM&t=2964s I just fired up the Unity Hub on my Mac - it needed a bit of an update, it's been 2years since I last used it and it was 6years since I originally installed it - wow, time flies.... and this is the thing to start learning....if you think HTML, then for this new Omniverse, the language to use is called USD: https://developer.nvidia.com/usd

 okay...okay...okay...so I managed to get Secret of Monkey Island running and working from the UltraSATAN disk drive - all is good with that. Then I thought, maybe I should get some of the "other" things I have lying around working too. Such as the NetUSBee that plugs in as a cartridge, here it is plugged into the 520 ST (with 4MB), although I did transfer over to use the 1040 ST (with 1MB) shortly afterwards: I found an old TPLink wifi extender device, that I could plug the Cat 5 cable into (and then downstairs, I had the other end plugged into the wifi router) and there is the device itself, not much to look at, but does what it was built for: This is a great little device that I obviously bought many years ago, got working once and then "forgot: about it.  It is basically a network card, plug in a CAT5/6 cable and you're good to go.  It has a couple of USB connections, someone wrote a USB Mouse driver for it, but doesn't look like anyone got any further with o...

You know what happens... you're attempting to do something useful / complex and the brain wanders off and you find yourself looking out the window....and then you spot a light aircraft or a "chem-trail" (snigger) up in the sky and you wonder to yourself, "I wonder what that actually is...?" ... no? just me? Well, as with everything today, there's a web-site for that. This is now my new background image for one of my old 21" monitors...it moves, it's kind of interesting and it is definitely geeky. Yes....I am procrastinating, attempting to get my Atari ST connected to my home network. Oh, is that the drone of another airplane engine I hear?  Oh, quick, best take a look! (if you zoom out a little bit - you get to see just how much "junk" is up in the sky!)

well..... it turns out that technology is not always your best friend. I ended up being successful and copied the Monkey Island .st files to a USB stick that I placed into my 1040 STFm that has a GOTEK drive within it.  I can now boot from disk1 and everything works as it should - game works, mouse works, in fact all fine - not sure what all the fuss was about?! What niggled me though was the fact I wanted it running from my 520 STFm that has 4MB RAM and the UltraSATAN hard-drive connected.  Never happy am I!?! Well, this was the challenge, but also the flaw.  I was using my Apple Mac with an external USB drive connected to copy the files from my 4TB HDD NAS storage onto the 720k formatted double density disks.  I was then copying those .st files manually onto the old MS-DOS 6.22 PC and using makedisk to extract the .st files out directly onto other double density disks - allowing them to be formatted for the Atari (usually 800k).  I would then take out that dis...

 https://coolcomponents.co.uk/products/luxonis-oak-1-depthai-hardware Luxonis Oak-1 DepthAI Hardware Now, this look interesting indeed..... AI at the Edge. The Oak-1 is an all-in-one machine vision solution. It’s a 4-trillion-operations-per-second AI powerhouse that performs your AI models on board so that your host is free to do whatever you need it to do. Its integrated 12 MegaPixel camera module communicates over an on board 2.1 Gbps MIPI interface directly to the Myriad X, which ingests this data and performs neural inference on it, returning the results over USB. Such a data path offloads the host processor from all of this work. In the common use case of object detection from a 12MP image, this means your host is now dealing with a 24 Kbps stream of what the objects are and where they are in the image, instead of a 2.1 Gbps stream of video. So an 87,500 reduction in data your host has to deal with, and such a reduction means that even on relatively slow hosts, one can use doz...

well.... I couldn't leave it there could I? After a bit of head scratching and Duck-Duck-Go-ing last thing last night, I found a little MS-DOS program called makedisk.exe v1.5.  I downloaded it to my phone at 1am or whatever it was, so that I could copy it over to my old PC laptop and try and use that instead of the Windows based app. It turns out, that I have an old PC (well, Mrs.Geeks old PC that I stole about 10years ago) that just boots into MS-DOS, but has a built in 3.5" floppy disk drive and well, would you look at that... it actually had a disk in the drive that said.... oh...I think I've been here before?! After checking out the date time stamps on some of the files, it looks like I've repeated this same exercise in 2011, 2013, 2015, 2017 and yet again now in 2021.... seems like I have a 2year cycle of doing retro-goodness and then get very distracted by work/work and then remember again and repeat the same thing over and over again - except this time, I'm...